“Making this film and having them open up to me, it had to be a reciprocal experience,” explains My Dad’s Tapes director Kurtis Watson. The Peterborough native makes his feature directorial debut with My Dad’s Tapes, a family affair that’s deeply personal, but one that should prove cathartic for many people in similar situations looking to unburden the pain they’ve been holding in. Watson invites an overdue conversation in his family by revisiting the story of his father, Leonard. The film recounts the heartbreaking story of how Leonard dropped eight-year-old Kurtis off at school one morning and never saw the family again. Leonard’s suicide marks a dark cloud in the family’s history, and Watson decides it’s time to confront what he’s carried with him over the years by discussing the past with his mother and his two sisters.
There are many tears here, but also a touching celebration of life as Watson sifts through the many home videos that Leonard captured while he was still alive. These family movies offer a bittersweet reminder of a father and husband’s love as Leonard spent hours upon hours documenting his kids’ childhoods, all the while keeping his pain hidden from his family. As Watson, his mother, and his sisters work through the heartache and the laughter, they begin the healing process in a way that invites more families and individuals to confront the stigma of silence. The more concentric circles My Dad’s Tapes builds around the family story, the more Watson learns of peers and family friends who lost a loved one in a suicide and have lingering questions about those who suffer in silence. My Dad’s Tapes offers a useful conversation starter for anyone looking to ease the burden as Watson builds trust with family member and opens up about his own mental health struggles and challenges coming to terms with his sexuality. The film bravely favours leading with care, rather than leading questions, to guide them to their cathartic finale.
My Dad’s Tapes premiered at Hot Docs earlier this year in the Canadian Spectrum competition and is continuing its festival run including a stop at the ongoing Windsor International Film Festival and a centerpiece screening at Toronto’s Rendezvous with Madness festival on Oct. 30. That event proves an ideal forum for anyone looking for guidance with such a conversation.
POV: Pat Mullen
KW: Kurtis Watson
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: What was going through your head when you decided to take this project on?
KW: At first, it was to get so much of what has been bottled up inside me over the course of 15 years outside of me. I wanted to talk about mental health to the people that I care most about, which is my family. Making the film was something that I knew would help me express myself and bring me closer to my family. Tackling mental health and stigma, it’s such a universal topic. Everybody struggles with mental health. My producer, Rob Viscardis, and I talked about how the film would be able to capture my journey of mental health and making an attempt to answer the harder questions.
Along the way, little moments ended up being significant just came out of the blue, like me coming out to my sisters. I knew that I never wanted to come out to them if they weren’t together—it just never felt like the right time. I’ve been struggling with coming to terms with who I am and looking at myself in the mirror in a positive way. Now, making this film, I was able to see the benefits of doing that and also knowing that I needed to gain their trust in the process. By coming out to them, I was able to have a better, more trusting relationship going forward. When we all watched the tapes, I wanted all of us to be on the same page. I didn’t want any secrets hidden between us, so we ended up planning it so that those conversations took place before the final scene of the film [where the family watches Leonard’s tapes]. Also, coming out about my own mental health, I never thought that I would talk about my personal experience with suicidal ideation.
POV: What resources or supports did you have to find the right way to address those issues for yourself in terms of the coming outs?
KW: My boyfriend is very into the queer scene in Toronto. He’s volunteered at a lot of youth groups and gotten opportunities through queer organizations. Seeing the positivity surrounding him and his experience in the queer community and also just seeing the positive response in my own life, whenever I do choose to come out, it reiterates the lack of a stigma in my own head. I’m like, ‘This is okay. This is something that nobody is going to hate you for.’ Surrounding yourself with people who that makes it easier to come to terms with who you actually are is really important.
POV: How did your family feel about participating in this project and revisiting the past?
KW: They never wanted to be on camera. Of course, they love my dad and they love me. When I approached them about making a film, they knew that it was going to help me because I was the youngest. I had so many more questions and they knew that this film ultimately was for me. And because of that, they were willing to do anything to help. I grew up with a very loving family. My sisters and my mom, they will do anything for me. Sometimes we have our moments as any family does, but I’m like the common denominator between the three of them. I am like the mediator in a lot of ways.
They were willing to do whatever it took to get the film made. But I didn’t want to re-traumatize them by talking about these sensitive subject matters, so I tried to make the filming with them as short as possible in an environment that facilitated these heartfelt conversations surrounded by family and the things that we hold close to us. All of the interviews are taking place in the basement and I surrounded them with because all of my dad’s memorabilia, collectibles, and things that he loved over the years.
POV: How do you balance the personal element of family versus say the director interviewee relationship?
KW: That was the hardest part about making this film. I knew if I was thinking about the film in these moments, it would all fall apart because film as a medium is difficult to make technically. People helped me with that on the technical level with camera lighting, audio—and then it was a matter of making sure that I’m answering the right questions in the right order. In the moment, I am having to deal with how I personally feel about the answers I’m being given and how what they’re saying is going to influence the film. There’s this juggling effect if I’ve asked a question and the answer wasn’t quite explained enough, then I might ask another question that I wouldn’t have asked. For me personally, I wanted to know a lot, so there was a lot of questions that, even if it wasn’t right for the film, I was still asking them because I personally was interested in knowing.
POV: That’s important because you can save the film in the edit, but you can’t say save your family in the edit. Some parts of the film are more formal sit down interviews, whereas others are more casual conversations, like at the end you and your sisters are by the water in a trailer park. How did you decide which environment, and which level of formality, to set for different conversations?
KW: The public places that we filmed had some sort of attachment to my dad. The trailer park is somewhere where my family grew up camping and those memories of my dad are some of our fondest memories. Going back to that place and also remembering him through the tapes, having him filmed in that exact location, I felt like it was a perfect opportunity to open up to my sister about exactly everything that he’s done for us. There are so many moments in the tapes where I think, “This man did everything for us and he filmed everything.” When we go back to those locations, it brings that to the forefront and reiterates in our minds all those emotions that we’ve had over the years and makes it easier to reminisce.
POV: Do you think your dad’s habit of recording things influenced your path to make films?
KW: Absolutely. The camera was always around. It became another thing in my life that was just as important as anything else. We would have friends over: the camera’s out. We would be going to the park: the camera’s out. We’d be going on a vacation: the camera’s out. Any little thing, the camera would be out. Every time my mom would ask me, I want for Christmas or for my birthday, I would always ask for a camera because the camera was something that my dad loved. I became in love with the camera vicariously through him. I was interested in capturing video from a very young age.
POV: When you were going through the tapes for this film, how did you decide what to include because you have years of material?
KW: I went through every single tape that my mom had digitized, which was every tape that we had. I watched them all and I wrote down on a notepad every moment that had anything to do with my dad. I gave that notepad with the time codes to my editor Rob. He had went through the tapes as well, but a lot of the moments in the notepad that I had written down were moments that we could use in the film. Rob was picking these little moments in the tapes, putting them in between the conversations, so the content of the tapes was chosen in the edit. We weren’t thinking about the tapes when we were filming. We just knew that the locations in the tapes were places that we wanted to film because we had access to them and they were in the tapes. There were some questions that I was asking in the interviews that pertained to some of the tapes, like the one about the fishing and how my dad was teaching Rebecca, my older sister, how to fish, so that maybe that answer could be used in correlation with one of the tapes.
POV: How was it watching the tapes again with your family? That’s such an emotional scene at the end.
KW: That was probably the most gratifying part of the whole process because I know that we never did that before. We would always have it on around Christmas time and stuff, and people would walk in and out of the room, and sometimes we would all laugh at a certain moment and reminisce for a few minutes, but this was a moment where I could have my family all in one place watching all the moments that my dad was seeing through those tapes. We were able to have all these memories boil down into this one experience. That was very cathartic for my family and I because we were able to visualize and conceptualize just how much of our lives he filmed. It’s hard to wrap your head around it when you’re looking at all the physical tapes, but to actually see it is another
POV: How do you situate such a personal story within the larger conversation, but without necessarily going the conventional talking heads out with statistics and experts, etc.?
KW: It was just going to be me, my two sisters, and my mom, and then my mom suggested I ask the pastor who helped us at the church. He was the first person who told me my dad had died. He’s the one who picked up my sisters and told them about his passing. He played a pivotal role, and it was only until a few weeks before we were going to film that I learned that he also had a father who died by suicide, and he also was around the same age as me. There was connection that went beyond helping my family. Having similar experiences made it easier to connect.
And then Christine helped my mom with the suicide support groups over the years. She had been working in suicide support for over 30 years because she also lost her husband to suicide. She helped my family by helping my mom through that difficult time. But she also knows what it’s like and she knows what other people’s struggle are like because she’s listened to others’ stories for so many years, so we decided that she also needs to be part of the film. That’s how we kept it tight-knit: We kind of made sure that everybody in the film had something to do with our family or helping our family, like the detective. We knew it might be beneficial to have some sort of mental health professional give a professional, almost scientific, approach to the film. But after hearing what Christine was saying about stigma, it was clear that we don’t really need that because Christine fills that gap as an advocate for suicide awareness, mental health, and therapy.
POV: What advice would you have for families, or even individuals, who are looking to get things off their chest and open up to friends and family?
KW: Just be true to yourself. If you want to talk about these heavy subjects with your family and friends, to be able to fully open up to them to allow them to open up to you, you need to put forth the trust that is needed to have them put trust back into you. That way, these conversations can happen and nobody feels like their secrets are being bottled up. Having an open space for those conversations too is good.
